The princess did not appear to notice the marked feeling of the Luck’s last words.
“Why,” she said, “my carriage does not need either coachman, shafts, or horses; it goes by steam, and at any hour it can easily do fifty thousand miles. You see you will have no trouble in getting home whenever it suits you. You have just to remember the gesture and words with which I start it.
“In the boot you will find various things that may be useful on the journey; they are every one of them yours. You open the boot as you would shell a green pea. There you will see three caskets, the shape and size of a pea, each fastened by a thread which keeps them in their cases like peas in a pod, so that they cannot jolt against each other when you travel or when you remove them. It is a wonderful contrivance!
“They will open at the pressure of your finger—like the hood of my carriage. Then all you have to do is to make a hole in the ground with your hoe, and sow some of their contents in it, to see whatever you may wish spring up, sprout and blossom. Is not that wonderful?
“Only remember this!—when the third casket is empty I have nothing else to offer you; for I have only three green peas, just as you had three measures of beans; and the prettiest girl in the world can give you no more than she has.
“Are you ready to set out now?”
The Luck of the Bean-rows bowed; he felt that he could not speak.
Pea-Blossom snapped her thumb and middle finger: “Off, chick pea!” she cried; and the field of sweet peas was left nine hundred miles behind while Luck of the Bean-rows was still turning this way and that, looking in vain for Pea-Blossom.
“Alas!” he sighed.
It would be doing scant justice to the speed of the magic carriage to say that it shot through space at the rate of a rifle bullet. Woods, towns, mountains, seas swept by quicker than magic lantern pictures. Far away horizons had scarcely risen in outline from the deep-down distance before they had plunged under the flying carriage. The Luck would have striven in vain to see them; when he turned to look back—flick! they had gone. At last, when he had several times outraced the sun, swept round the globe, caught it up and again outstripped it, with rapid changes from day to night and from night to day, it suddenly struck the Luck of the Bean-rows that he had passed the great town he was going to and the market for his beans.